But once again, it was wishful thinking. Unfortunately, Mary was not pregnant, but suffering from a lingering illness. Her health had been steadily deteriorating during the past year. The Venetian Giovanni Michieli, who had left England in 1557, when his ambassadorial duties came to an end, noted then that the forty-one-year-old monarch appeared “very grave,” her “wrinkles . . . caused more by anxieties than by age, which make her appear some years older.” Michieli admired Mary’s “wonderful grandeur and dignity,” and thought her “valiant” and “brave,” but attributed much of her “deep melancholy” to “suffocation of the matrix [womb],” which was believed to be caused by retention of menstrual fluids, a medical condition that had plagued Mary for decades. According to Michieli, “the remedy of tears and weeping . . . which from childhood she has been accustomed, and still often used by her,” was now insufficient, requiring the queen to be “blooded either from the foot or elsewhere, which keeps her always pale and emaciated.” The Venetian also attributed Mary’s bitter and lachrymose disposition to her unhappiness in love and marriage, and her resentment toward, and jealousy of, Elizabeth.
At the end of March, still believing herself to be pregnant, the queen wrote her will. The assumption that her kingdom would be left to the heir she carried within her was more than a refusal to accept reality; it was a legal document intended to keep Elizabeth off the throne.
But the spring came and a baby didn’t. By the end of May, Philip’s letters to England no longer mentioned the prospect of imminent fatherhood. Over the summer of 1558, Mary grew progressively weaker. Ultimately accepting that she was not pregnant and needed to name a successor, she added a codicil to her will stating that if God did not grant her an heir from the fruits of her body, then she would be “succeeded by my next heir and successor by the Laws and Statutes of this realm.” The codicil did not name Elizabeth, but Mary acknowledged that by those same laws and statutes Elizabeth was the rightful heir to her throne.
Having bequeathed a number of gifts to her husband in her will, including the “table diamond” that Charles V had sent her upon their betrothal, urging Philip to keep it as a memento, Mary also exhorted him to protect and care for England after her eventual demise “as a father in his care, as a brother in his love and favour . . . and a most assured and undoubted friend to her country and subjects.” Despite this entreaty, within thirty years, Philip II, king of Spain would be England’s deadliest enemy.
In accordance with Mary and Philip’s marriage treaty, all of his prerogatives in England would cease with her death. By the beginning of November 1558, Mary was the likely victim of an influenza epidemic that was ravaging the country, and in pain from her other ailments and conditions, including, quite possibly, uterine cancer and/or ovarian cysts, and she did not have long to live. A parliamentary delegation visited her on the sixth of the month and, for the sake of the realm, pressed her to name an heir. No coyness, no vagueness; misunderstandings and miscommunications could lead to civil unrest, or worse. Accepting the inevitable, Mary agreed to nominate Elizabeth as her successor. Aware even as she said the words that they were spoken in futility, she asked that Elizabeth discharge her debts after her demise and keep the Catholic religion as it had been established.
On November 17, 1558, at St. James’s Palace, the forty-two-year-old Mary I died during a final Mass at her bedside. Philip was in Brussels at the time, mourning the death of his father. He informed his sister Juana in Spain of the event, writing unemotionally, “my wife is dead. May God have received her into his glory. I felt a reasonable regret for her death.”
However, Philip did hold a proxy funeral for Mary in Brussels at the end of November. The chief mourner was Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, the man Philip had hoped would wed his former sister-in-law, Elizabeth. A riderless black horse with a crown perched upon its saddle represented the late queen.
Mary’s body lay in state in a lead coffin in the Privy Chamber of St. James’s Palace for three weeks. In accordance with royal tradition, her heart and viscera were removed and her belly slit open, the cavity filled with sweet-smelling herbs and spices. Respecting the Catholic traditions, Elizabeth made sure that Masses were said ’round the clock and the room was illuminated with candles. Mary had wanted to be interred beside her mother, who reposes at Peterborough Abbey, or to have Katherine of Aragon’s remains removed to Westminster, but she was not granted her final wish.
On December 10, her coffin was carried to the Chapel Royal. Three days later, the funeral cortege made its slow and somber procession to Westminster Abbey, where Mary was laid to rest with great pomp and majesty in a traditional Catholic funeral. No expense was spared. The new queen had insisted that the details laid down in their father’s “funeral book” be followed to the letter.
Ironically, the half sisters, more often at odds than not, would eventually share a tomb in Westminster Abbey, although the monument to Elizabeth, erected by her successor James I in 1603, all but eclipses Mary’s grave. The half siblings shared a royal motto as well. For all of the Virgin Queen’s grand innovations, she cribbed her older sister’s “Veritas Temporis Filia”—“Truth Is the Daughter of Time.”
Elizabeth did not pay Mary’s debts; nor, of course, did she maintain England’s ties to the Church of Rome. During her reign she would burn Catholics for heresy, but was never blackened with the sobriquet “Bloody Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth and Philip tried at first to maintain amicable relations between their respective realms, but it became impossible. Philip was prepared to commit himself to the Ridolfi plot in 1571 that would overthrow Elizabeth, replacing her with Mary, Queen of Scots—yet he did not condone Elizabeth’s assassination. Although Mary’s execution in 1587 ended Philip’s hopes of placing a Catholic monarch on England’s throne, he was not prepared to mend fences with Elizabeth. In his view, she was sanctioning piracy on Spanish vessels bearing treasure from his territories in the New World.
In 1588, their ships met in one of history’s most famous naval battles. Spain’s purportedly invincible armada proved otherwise, substantially aided by Mother Nature, who churned up a massive storm in the English Channel, causing many of the Spanish fleet to lose their bearings. Under fire, the Spanish losses were significant enough to force them to retreat. Undeterred by the defeat of his grand armada, Philip would send two more armadas to England, in 1596 and 1597, and a third, in 1599, which ended up being diverted to the Canary Islands and the Azores for defensive purposes there. The Anglo-Spanish War would continue until both Elizabeth and Philip were dead.
After Mary’s death, Philip married twice more. In 1559, the year after Mary’s demise, he wed Elisabeth of Valois, the oldest daughter of the French king Henri II and Catherine de Medici. They had five children, although only two of them survived to adulthood, but Elisabeth died hours after suffering a miscarriage in 1568. In 1570, Philip took a fourth wife, Anna of Austria. Anna was not only his niece, but was a cousin of her own stepdaughter, Catherine Michelle of Spain. The Spanish Hapsburg inbreeding, one of three uncle-niece marriages in the line of Philip II, would ultimately destroy the dynasty: physical abnormalities, deformities, and mental illness eventually resulted in sterility and early deaths. Nonetheless, by all accounts, Philip and Anna enjoyed a happy marriage, producing eight children (four of each), although most of them died young. Anna passed away after giving birth to their daughter Maria in 1580.
Philip’s oldest child, his son Don Carlos by his first wife, Maria Manuela, Princess of Portugal, died without issue in 1568.
Philip’s own end was agonizing. Suffering from cancer exacerbated by a high fever, gout, and a horrifically painful attack of dropsy (edema or swelling in the joints), he lay in extremis for fifty-two days, steadily deteriorating. Because he was in too much agony to be bathed, a hole was cut in his mattress for the release of bodily fluids. The seventy-one-year-old Philip died on September 13, 1598, in El Escorial near Madrid, the historic reside
nce of kings of Spain. He was buried there the following day. Philip was succeeded by his twenty-year-old son Philip III, whose mother had been Anna of Austria.
Philip II’s thirty-two-year reign in Spain had witnessed the blossoming of a cultural renaissance. It was the Golden Age in literature, music, and the visual arts; the era of Cervantes, and of El Greco and the Mannerists.
Also known as the Spanish Tudor, Mary I has gone down in history as one of England’s worst sovereigns, further tarred with the nickname “Bloody Mary” for her highly unpopular executions of Protestant evangelical dissenters.
Where history has glorified her half sister and successor, Elizabeth, Mary has been vilified. Then and ever since, this incomplete and jaded image of Mary was created by a largely Protestant body of scholars who, by burnishing Elizabeth’s achievements, sought to tarnish or diminish the accomplishments of her Catholic predecessor. As a result, we are not left with a true or full picture of England’s first queen regnant. During the sixteenth century, the writings of the Scottish reformer John Knox and the Elizabethan-era evangelical John Foxe, through his 1563 Actes and Monuments (more commonly known as the Book of Martyrs), which graphically depicts “the horrible and bloudy time of Queene Mary,” helped to cement her image as a tyrant. By 1600, Catholicism itself was viewed as foreign and un-English. Had Mary lived longer or reigned for even half as many years as Elizabeth, her efforts to solidify a Catholic restoration might have been largely successful. She had many coreligionists, even if she had very few supporters for her methods of stamping out heresy.
Yet Mary provided both a vital role model and an object lesson for her younger sister. Elizabeth, whose reign was nine times longer, reaped many of the benefits from reforms and programs that Mary had sown during her brief five years on the throne. Hardworking, conscientious, and diligent, Mary literally burned the midnight oil, devoting long days to the governance of the realm. On her ascendance she inherited more problems than a deep religious schism, which would have been enough trouble to contend with on its own. England was plagued at the time with a massive amount of debt that Mary sought to bring under control with plans for currency reform (which Elizabeth I was ultimately able to achieve), and the search for new commercial markets for England’s exports. Mary granted a royal charter to the Muscovy Company, commissioned a world atlas, and sanctioned exploration to the coast of Africa.
During her last two years on the throne, Mary and her council worked to provide disaster relief to families afflicted by poor harvests and health epidemics. Her government also passed a Militia Act in 1558, which gave the lord lieutenants in England’s respective counties the responsibility for raising troops and mustering commissions. Mary overhauled the administration and finances of the navy and ensured that her ships were in good repair. Those vessels aided Philip by clearing French shipping from the English Channel during his ill-advised war with France in 1557. Nevertheless, Mary’s reputation remains marred by this military defeat, and for centuries, biographers repeated the—likely apocryphal—incident recorded in Holinshed’s Chronicles that Mary lamented after the debacle, “When I am dead and opened you will find Calais lying in my heart.”
How ironic that the robust navy Elizabeth inherited from Mary, and was able to strengthen even further, would in 1588 engage in the mother of all sea battles with Mary’s husband’s Spanish Armada, solidifying England’s dominance of the waves and shaming Philip of Spain.
Without intending to do so, Mary’s marital actions and decisions, as well as the unintended consequences of an inglorious union, had also taught her sister a key life lesson. Mary’s overt desperation for a husband who did not reciprocate her passion was the talk of her own court and was snickered about in foreign dispatches. Her insistence on wedding Philip in the first place nearly discredited her sovereignty and derailed her fragile monarchy. As for Philip, he was on a different page from the outset, never viewing their marriage as anything more than a treaty; from the moment the bridal couple left the altar, the Spanish courtiers gossiped about his effort to master his revulsion for her body.
By the time Elizabeth ascended the throne, she had seen all too well what happened—and not merely politically—when a queen of England wed a foreign sovereign. The public and private price that Mary paid in emotional, physical, and psychological currency, appearing the fool by giving her heart so freely to an undeserving man who hardly mirrored her affection, could never yield a reward that would outweigh the risk.
ISABELLA ROMOLA de MEDICI
AND
PAOLO d’ORSINI, DUKE OF BRACCIANO
MARRIED: 1558–1576 &
ELEONORA di GARZIA di TOLEDO
AND
PIETRO de MEDICI
MARRIED: 1571–1576
“Inglorious” can also mean “dishonorable” and “scandalous,” but the union of Isabella Romola de Medici and Paolo d’Orsini as well as that of Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo and Pietro de Medici are the only inglorious marriages profiled here that also qualify for the pages of a true-crime compendium, culminating as they did in a shocking pair of “honor killings” that even the likes of Al Capone might not have contemplated.
Perhaps even more horrifying than the lurid details of the assassination of a pair of beautiful cousins at the hands of their husbands—the quartet as high-living as they were highborn, yet none of them a faithful spouse—was that the men literally got away with murder. Where these two married couples were concerned, the Medici motto, “Semper,” meaning “forever,” with its attendant connotations of loyalty, did not apply.
In the sixteenth century, Italy was comprised of several city-states and kingdoms. While the Spanish Hapsburgs ruled the kingdom of Naples in the south, powerful families such as the Este, Ferrara, Sforza, Orsini, and Medici vied for domination of Rome and the northern cities.
The House of Medici gained prominence in Florence in the late fourteenth century, becoming wealthy from the textile trade—which led to myriad slurs against them as merchants, no matter how high they rose socially. Although their beginnings were humbler, ultimately their international influence was gained through banking. By making canny political and social connections, the Medici bank eventually became the largest and most respected financial institution in Renaissance Europe, and over the next few generations its family members gained immense political power in Tuscany and beyond, producing four Medici popes. In 1532, under Hapsburg auspices, the Medici became the hereditary dukes of Florence; the title was elevated to Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569. However, the family would always be considered Italian citizens rather than royalty, a distinction often made by the bridegroom’s relatives whenever one of the family’s upwardly mobile heiresses married a social superior, including the union of Catherine de Medici to the future Henri II of France.
The Medici had strong ties to the Spanish Hapsburgs. In 1539, the daughter of the Spanish Viceroy of Naples, Eleonora di Toledo, wed the duke of Florence, Cosimo I de Medici, in a love match. Such an illustrious marriage also helped legitimize the powerful Florentine family’s ducal title.
Their romance is practically biblical. Cosimo had fallen in love with Eleonora, who was the younger daughter of Pedro Álvarez di Toledo, yet the Viceroy of Naples was unwilling to let her leave the family without a struggle. He tried to convince Cosimo to wed his older, less beautiful daughter Isabella instead—a Leah-for-Rachel scenario. Cosimo stood fast. He wanted the lovely Eleonora, not her elder sister, but Álvarez made him pay for the pleasure; Eleonora’s dowry would be fifty thousand scudi less than he was prepared to give Cosimo if he took Isabella off his hands.
The fertile Eleonora was known as “La Fecundissima.” She and Cosimo, who was elevated from Duke of Florence to the first Grand Duke of Tuscany by the king of Spain and Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, became the proud parents of eleven children. Cosimo particularly doted on the older girls, Maria, Lucrezia, and Isabella.
Isa
bella Romola de Medici, Eleonora and Cosimo’s third daughter, was born shortly after the death of his beloved illegitimate daughter Bia, a golden-haired six-year-old angel. Pampered as a child, and always her babbo, or daddy’s, favorite, Isabella was, in her father’s eyes, the reincarnation of Bia, and Cosimo showered all the love upon her that he had once bestowed on his precious bastard daughter. Death had taken Bia, but if Cosimo had anything to say about it, he was never going to let Isabella part from him. And that was perfectly all right with her!
In Cosimo’s opulent Florentine court, his large Medici brood was raised together, flouting the custom of giving sons and daughters of the nobility separate, and different, upbringings. All of Cosimo’s children were afforded the same advantages of a sophisticated humanist education; however, accepting the perceived wisdom of the era that female children should learn to sew and spin, an effort was made to school Isabella in these womanly arts. As a home-economics student, she was a disaster. She hated girly-girl activities, and did not excel at them. Yet she had been passionate about dancing since she was a toddler, and was a superb equestrienne and huntress, raising and training her own hounds.
There was no stigma attached to her being considered an intellectual. As a child, Isabella was familiar with Virgil and Homer. By the time she was a teenager she spoke several languages impeccably, and was a gifted lute player and the author of numerous madrigals, talented enough to have been a professional musician and composer. Isabella was specifically renowned for her poesia per musica, patently hedonistic, erotic verses filled with double entendres.
Inglorious Royal Marriages Page 15
